The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has announced that it is dropping its BlackBerry smartphones for a new fleet of iPhone 5s

Research In Motion's (RIM) BlackBerry line of devices have been a staple in the enterprise and government sectors for years, but recently, that monopoly has crumbled and there's no signs of that stopping.

In a trend that seems to be ongoing, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has announced that it is dropping its BlackBerry smartphones for a new fleet of iPhone 5s. The board's reasoning is that its BlackBerrys "have been failing both at inopportune times and at an unacceptable rate."

Before the NTSB, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) ditched their BlackBerrys in May in favor of iPhones. Immigration and Customs Enforcement followed suit in September, and in October, the Defense Department left its BlackBerrys behind and chose to go with Android and Apple devices instead.

A lot of BlackBerrys troubles stem from a huge incident that occurred in October 2011. For four days, BlackBerry users from around the world completely lost their messaging, browsing and email services. These three features are key to any business (or consumer) user, and proved to be a huge mark on RIM's record. RIM blamed the service troubles on an extremely critical network failure during a system upgrade.

Since then, RIM co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis stepped down and named the new CEO Thorsten Heins.

However, a new CEO hasn't completely wiped away RIM's problems. It's about to release a new mobile operating system, called BlackBerry 10 (BB10) in late January 2013, and with so many businesses and government agencies dropping the devices, analysts expect the new OS to be dead on arrival.

Heins seems to believe differently. He was recently quoted saying, "I think it's all lining up. Sometimes you get the feeling that the universe is in disarray, and with BlackBerry 10 coming, I see the stars lining up."

But apple does still pay US taxes. A quick google says they've paid $4,5 billion in US taxes in 2010. That's still enough to fund the entire US government for a day, or atleast it was in 2010.

Maybe it's not US made but atleast you're still helping one of your own companies. If you want it US made start working for wages low enough that it's no longer profitable making and then shipping the things from china. It's not like you have to work at their wages, just at wages lower then their wages+transport costs to the US.